Stats suggest more photo radar dollars should be spent on infrastructure fixes, council hopeful says

With a municipal election looming, photo radar stands to be a talking point. Troy Pavlek believes the numbers may be a good place to start the discussion.

Pavlek, a 22-year-old software developer eyeing the Ward 11 council seat, has been busy digging through photo radar statistics obtained through access to information requests.

“The first thing that you notice is that all photo radar tickets are sort of trending towards the centre,” he said, adding tickets for speeds between six and 10 km/h over the speed limit have levelled off following a huge jump about four years ago, a jump he attributes to more enforcement in school zones.

Tickets for speeds between 11 and 15 km/h over the limit, though, have steadily grown from 42 per cent of all tickets in 2014 to almost half of all tickets last year from January to the end of November.

He contends that photo radar has its merits.

“It should be a tool on our tool belt, but it should be the last tool. We should fight for engineering changes, education and then, if nothing else works, implement the photo radar,” he said.

Along with the total tickets issued, Pavlek has published online a breakdown of where the ticket revenue goes.

About 37 per cent of budgeted revenues are expected to go to Edmonton police, he said. The office of photo radar operations gets the next largest share, about 22 per cent, followed by the photo radar reserve.

Lower down on that list are traffic safety capital and traffic safety initiatives, garnering 11 per cent and eight per cent, respectively.

Pavlek said those priorities should be revisited.

Police should get support, he said, but the city can’t tell them how to spend the money, so there’s no guarantee it is spent on safer roads.

The city has adopted the Vision Zero strategy, which prescribes infrastructure changes to battle speeding and other traffic issues, Pavlek said.

“So if we’re putting additional dollars from photo radar back into whatever enforcement EPS decides to do, then we’re not following Vision Zero, we’re not making the infrastructure changes that make photo radar relevant,” he said.

The Edmonton Police Service says it has scores of officers focused on criminal activity behind the wheel and traffic safety.

“For 2017, the EPS will be focusing extra efforts on pedestrian enforcement to ensure both pedestrians (jay-walking) and drivers (yielding to pedestrians) are obeying the rules of the road,” said police spokesperson Cheryl Shepard.

Pavlek may not be alone in his thinking.

In November, Coun. Bryan Anderson saw a need for some lighted crosswalks in his ward where new neighbourhoods are increasing the number of students having to cross busy roads.

He asked city staff to let him know how much of the photo radar reserve has yet to be allocated, along with a list of projects that are eligible for the money and the cost of doing them.

“I was just looking to a source of funds that wasn’t going to get tied up in the budget,” Anderson said.

He hopes the answers give an idea of where to go from here, but some of the solutions may not be given until 2018.

Pavlek would like to see the same attention given to pedestrian-heavy areas such as the downtown core, but admits it could mean approaching it one intersection at a time.

“(Photo radar) is an enforcement tool and it’s a good one to have,” Pavlek said. “Abuse of it in the wrong locations, that’s the thing we need to target.”

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